New Horizon Mission Design Essay
New Horizons Mission Design
YANPING GUO and ROBERT W. FARQUHAR
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins
Road, Laurel, MD 20723-6099, U.S.A.
(e-mail: yanping.guo@jhuapl.edu, robert.farquhar@jhuapl.edu)
Abstract
The mission design for the New Horizons mission went through more than five years of numerous revisions and updates before its launch on January 19, 2006. For the baseline mission design, the New Horizon spacecraft is expected to fly by Jupiter on February 28, 2007 to gain a needed speed boost and encounter Pluto on July 14, 2015 after a 9.5-year journey from launch, followed by extended mission to Kuiper Belt objects. In order to meet the New Horizons mission design objectives, requirements and …show more content…
Charon does not move around Pluto; instead, Pluto and Charon
3
move around the center of mass of the Pluto system, the Pluto barycenter. The
PKB mission is to carry out the first scientific reconnaissance of the Pluto system and accomplish the specified science objectives and goals through a close flyby of
Pluto and Charon.
The outer space beyond the orbit of Neptune is referred as the Kuiper Belt. It was named after Gerald Kuiper, who predicted in 1951, as a hypothesis, that the shortperiod comets originate from a collection of material left over from the formation of the solar system. Kuiper’s theory was proved with the discovery of the first
Kuiper belt object by David Jewitt and Jane Luu (Jewitt and Luu, 1993) in 1992.
Since then, numerous Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) have been discovered each year. So far, the number of KBOs identified is over 1000, which is believed to be only a very small fraction of the total number of KBOs. For the first time, the
PKB mission aims to explore the Kuiper Belt region by visiting one or more
KBOs in an extended mission following the Pluto-Charon encounter. The KBO encounter is a highly desired mission goal, not one of the NASA AO’s mission
YANPING GUO and ROBERT W. FARQUHAR
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins
Road, Laurel, MD 20723-6099, U.S.A.
(e-mail: yanping.guo@jhuapl.edu, robert.farquhar@jhuapl.edu)
Abstract
The mission design for the New Horizons mission went through more than five years of numerous revisions and updates before its launch on January 19, 2006. For the baseline mission design, the New Horizon spacecraft is expected to fly by Jupiter on February 28, 2007 to gain a needed speed boost and encounter Pluto on July 14, 2015 after a 9.5-year journey from launch, followed by extended mission to Kuiper Belt objects. In order to meet the New Horizons mission design objectives, requirements and …show more content…
Charon does not move around Pluto; instead, Pluto and Charon
3
move around the center of mass of the Pluto system, the Pluto barycenter. The
PKB mission is to carry out the first scientific reconnaissance of the Pluto system and accomplish the specified science objectives and goals through a close flyby of
Pluto and Charon.
The outer space beyond the orbit of Neptune is referred as the Kuiper Belt. It was named after Gerald Kuiper, who predicted in 1951, as a hypothesis, that the shortperiod comets originate from a collection of material left over from the formation of the solar system. Kuiper’s theory was proved with the discovery of the first
Kuiper belt object by David Jewitt and Jane Luu (Jewitt and Luu, 1993) in 1992.
Since then, numerous Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) have been discovered each year. So far, the number of KBOs identified is over 1000, which is believed to be only a very small fraction of the total number of KBOs. For the first time, the
PKB mission aims to explore the Kuiper Belt region by visiting one or more
KBOs in an extended mission following the Pluto-Charon encounter. The KBO encounter is a highly desired mission goal, not one of the NASA AO’s mission